Dead Island’s Lively Trailer

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Poor old Dead Island – it must be pretty stressful, putting out any new trailer after the frenzy around that one. Especially as they now need to show off the actual game, rather than just a conceptual short film. The E3 trailer has several elements in common with the CGI weepfest, notably slow motion, the music and a few snippets of dialogue to suggest emotional as well as gory horror, but all told I’m preeeeeeeetty sure we’re looking at an all-out carnival of death.

Looks like it gets pretty sci-fi too. More so than zombies, I mean – all sorts of strangeness going on there.

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The machete and baseball bat look pretty bad, too. How hard can it be to make a 3D machete that looks like one? Also, agreeing with the comment about the player’s arm looking odd, and not moving quite right. It’s like they used up all their polygon and texture budget for the scenery and zombies, and didn’t have anything left for the PC.

Agreed. Still deeply looking forward to the game itself, but that trailer was all over the place. Plus, I liked it better playing as a terrified French woman rather than as an adrenaline-overdriven grunt who calls all the zombies “bitch”. I’d better still be able to play as the French lady.

Exactly what I was thinking. “Right in the fucking head”?
Uh.
And the electric machete.
And the man hanging from a branch of a palm tree? (this is not strictly related, but have you ever seen a branch of a palm tree?)
Make up your minds already!

I am hoping this game will be about survival instead of slaughtering a bazillion trillion zombies. I’ve played enough Left 4 Dead. Give me a game where I am actually scared of zombies, instead of looking at them and not caring.

Yeah, but you never look at a room full of zombies in L4D2 and think “shit, there’s a bunch of normal zombies in there and I’m terrified of going in”. You just charge in with your gun and start shooting stuff up. L4D2 is an action game, not a survival game.

Yeah, the players arms look funny alright.. because they’re totally disconnected from the game world.
For a game that’s been making such a fuss about its melee combat they really need to work on the first-person animations and the player’s connection with the world.

The knife being thrown is clearly working something like this in terms of procedure:

While that’s fine, the problem here is that it’s painfully obvious that the knife ‘projectile’ isn’t the one from the first-person view, it’s a knife ‘bullet’ spawned on demand.
The same seems true for the melee swings, which just don’t feel like they’re actually connected to their effect on the target; there’s some kind of wonky dissociation going on there.

If the animations were better none of that would be so obvious or jarring, and for a game where melee combat is supposedly the emphasis I think it’s something they should have gotten right, instead of this halfway-house between giving the player a body and making them a floating head with attached arms, which just doesn’t feel right in the videos so far.
It’s at the kind of standard I’d have expected from a mod for half-life back in the day, not a new title with melee combat versus zombies as its main gimmick.

Yeah, they really went to town with the stock sound effects for this trailer!
That’s not the wilhelm scream when he opens the door to outside though. It’s one of the other generic, over-used scream sounds; I think.
Is the Wilhelm in there too?

Ever since that story trailer, everyone’s treating this as a AAA game and complaining accordingly. Let’s not forget that this is a wonky, moderately-budgeted game from a Polish developer whose biggest titles have been Chrome and Call of Juarez.

Yes, there will be a lot of shortcuts taken, animations and models and effects that aren’t top-end. I’m just hoping it gets a terrifying enough atmosphere and is satisfyingly wonky and open-world to maintain some real character, and it looks like they’re getting these right so far.

I do have similar misgivings and hopes to the previous posters, but I do like the way the windscreen glass crazes on impact with zombie-head, then needs to be pushed out. I think it’s best illustrated in the video that RPS posted about previous to this one. A small thing, but pleasing.

At first when i heared of Dead Island i wanted it to be an online survival horror. A game where you have to eat, sleep, barricade yourself from the zombies and find or make NORMAL weapons to defend yourself. With normal weapons i mean weapons that you could actually create yourself in the middle of nowhere. I wanted a game where you had a backpack which could contain a few items, your character had individual skills ofcourse teamwork would be very important. A game that crossed my mind was the game “Tresspasser” some of u might still know it. The game itsself was very bad but the idea behind it was pretty fun. You were all alone on a island filled with dinosaurs , with only a few guns and some ammo at your disposal.

Now i know this game won’t be like that. I still think this could be a very fun game although it could’ve been way better :)

The closest thing to sci-fi is that home made power sword thing. Unless you’re referring to the whole two days in the future kind of sci-fi created to show us an interpretation of how society would cope under certain circumstances…

Right so its just another L4D (think i even saw boomers in there)… Was hoping for an open world zombie game where you have to pick a ‘home’ and setup shop, occasionally going out for supplies… preferably co-op too :) someday…. someday